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Alternative to Google Maps for sharing
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Privacy
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what3words is proprietary and the owner is profit-hungry and litigious, I would recommend avoiding it.
Some basic info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What3words#Proprietary
This has been my worry that some big tech company buys it out. There is latitude and longitude. But its not as easy to remember.
Huh, I had no idea that was the case. How does what3words make money exactly? I assume ads but I block those everywhere I use a screen.
Are there any services that do roughly the same thing but are open source?
Basically they license out the system to companies. You can get a rough idea here: https://what3words.com/business
The idea is that by making it free to individuals they build up market familiarity and expectation. Free personal use is just marketing for the paid product. Then they can turn to businesses and convince them that they should offer their system as a service and charge them for it.
The closest alternative is probably Plus Codes. They are driven by Google but are free to use for everything with a pretty plain and simple Terms of Use.
Instead of words they use an alphanumeric encoding. The main downside is that this can be less memorable but the upside is that it works for users of all languages and you can shorten the codes by using a Country or City reference as well as control the precision.